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Manually Creating Optimized Windows Images for VMware Horizon VMs | VMware sWORDs arakelian
Gina,
My feedback is that this asset has gotten many, many hits from my customers as well as colleagues and team in our efforts to build Master images for projects and labs.
I'd be interested to see how many hits this gets, 'Daily'
Top marks for sure!
Maybe add something about why certain choices are made, I know when I refer people to it and they ask questions there are some choices I don't know how to explain every time. Its probably general image management best practices but I keep getting asked why are we generalizing when it works fine when you don't.
9-12.6K hits per month in the last 12 months and we had somewhere around 20 remarks/questions on the guide. A large portion of those are praises, and we had 9 people that couldn’t get it working.
7 of those deviated from the guide (and had no issues when following it to the letter) 2 didn’t respond to follow up questions. The others where textual changes which we adjusted.
Which choices would you like to see explained?
The VM Tools section is either new, or I totally overlooked it.
Does installing tools without those custom options have any known performance impact?
It was in there before, but from the UI. The video driver is done to ease updates (no sequence dependency between Horizon Agent and VMware Tools), the other removed features came from earlier recommendation, but I haven’t measured it.
That makes a lot of sense, my other question was about updated VMtools as I saw later in this documentation where they just update with no regard for sequence! Back to the base image for those changes.
Why are is it suggested to export the VM, I'm assuming its to recover the space savings. Why not instead run the vmktools command to recover the space like in the below kb. I'm assuming its because its easier, but I'm seeing people here and there have issues with the export and import of ovf files through the webclient like in Re: Invalid response code: 500 so I'm wondering if the vmkfstools command is better.
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/
SDelete
command (or a tool with similar functionality) to zero out all unused space. The syntax for the SDelete command is SDelete -z driveletter. If you use SDelete
, ensure that you use version 1.6 or later.vmkfstools -K /path/to/disk-name.vmdk
Both methods will work to reclaim unused space. Using Export to OVF also helps if you need to copy and use the VM in a different vCenter environment.
vmkfstools only works on VMFS storage, plus not everyone has SSH access.
There is a step missing after
It is necessary to cancel the tools installer so that the windows ISO becomes available otherwise you won't be able to select next to install to the newly discovered unallocated space.
This should not be necessary if you used 2 CD/DVD-Drives (Step 8). The first one is connected to your Windows ISO. Once you click "Install VMware tools" it will be attached to the second CD/DVD drive and the Windows ISO will still be available.
If you didn't add a second CD/DVD drive, then the Windows ISO would be disconnected and replaced by the VMware tools ISO indeed.
The section under "Deactivate the Local Administrator User Account" mentions creating the policy in "Computer Configuration." That will work, but only if there is another local administrator present.
Since I don't want any local admins, we defined the policy under User Configuration instead. The policy was applied correctly and the built-in Administrator account was successfully disabled.
Can you elaborate on the state a VM template should be in when prepared for use in an instant-clone scenario? Should it be generalized and syspreped?
@almostIT , the Tech Zone article goes into it quite well. Yes, it should be generalized and syspreped. The system should not be in template form but as a VM instead. You create snapshots from the golden image VM and instant clones are created from the snapshots.
https://techzone.vmware.com/resource/windows-os-optimization-tool-vmware-horizon-guide
Of course, the "template" machines are not actual VM templates. I was referring to them incorrectly. They are VMs, turned on an in a prepared state, but not published.
I never take snapshots of them either, and they work every time. I was under the impression, after watching a few VMware published videos, that it wasn't necessary to take snapshots for use with instant clones (anymore), due to changes in how they prepared and processed them. I could be wrong about that too.
Your mistaking the cp-template files, with the image described in the doc I think. You absolutely need to take snapshots of the vm your working on, once you push it a cp-template is created and depending on the pool you might get parent images on each host or you will just get clones of the templates. They are not actual vm template which are different. The instaclone process has will determine what type to use based on the size of the pool to help speed up the process.
I have never heard of using instant clones without snapshots. At least in my build of the Connection Server (8.4.1 build - 20741546), snapshots are absolutely necessary.
I'm using DaaS - aka Horizon Cloud on premise. 😞